Sheba

140
WESTERN ARABIA AND THE SHEBA-MENELIK CYCLE
specialized activities (English has many Dutch nautical words such as deck,
yacht, skipper, and boom).
There are several major Arabic dialects in western Arabia, each
containing subgroups. The main groups are Yemen, Himyar, ‘Azd, North
Yemen, Hudhail, Hijaz, and Tayyi’. The major work comparing them to
Hebrew/Canaanite was undertaken in Hebrew (1946) and English (1951)
by Chaim Rabin, Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew at the
University of Oxford. Rabin quickly noted the “surprising similarities and
parallelisms of West Arabian with Canaanite.” Rabin’s generation took for
granted that the homeland of the Old Testament and of Hebrew/Canaanite
was Palestine and he therefore remarked: “A northern origin [of West
Arabian] would certainly supply the easiest explanation.” Rabin took the
Yemeni dialect of Arabic and found a number of words similar to Hebrew
such as devil, lord, furrow, wooden poker, firewood, thick clay, a small axe,
to romp, to hoe, sycamore, deep river gorge, to sit, and to shine. He stated
“the list is too long to be taken as mere coincidence.” He also noted that
Ge’ez “agrees in some points of vocabulary with Hebrew against all other
Semitic languages.” Here at last is linguistic evidence that seems to support
the inscriptions near Mekele stating that Hebrew and Sabaeans once lived
together under Sabaean rulers. Wolf Leslau, the renown scholar of
Ethiopian religion, traditions, and languages, discovered an extraordinary
number of similarities between Hebrew and Amharic, geographically the
furthest removed of Ethiopia’s Semitic languages from Hebrew. In addition,
Leslau investigated contributions from Ge’ez and South Arabic to Hebrew.
He noted that Gafat, an extinct language once spoken in Blue Nile area (the
alleged location of the Hebrew Damot state of Queen Yudit), had words
similar to Hebrew, e.g. bäsärä (meat), mäce (when), which do not occur in
Amharic. Leslau also discovered that some Hebrew words were identical in
Cushitic. Leslau’s work unfortunately does not draw any conclusions,
probably because Leslau dismisses any notion that the Old Testament
occurred in western Arabia.
In linguistics there is a basic list of 100 words developed by Morris
Swadesh (1909-67). Critics believed that 100 words were insufficient for
linguistic analysis; but when a further 100 were added, the results were the
same. Swadesh reasoned that on average two languages from an ancestral
language would retain 86 per cent of the basic words after a thousand years
of separation. Studies accomplished among the languages of the Caucasus
gave 48 per cent for 2290 years; 30 per cent for 3990 years,